


Étude

by Aviaries



Series: How a Marriage Falls Apart [2]
Category: Falsettos - Lapine/Finn
Genre: (I mean Marvin. Trina is straight.), But whatever, Drama, Jewish, Marvin/Trina is a PAST relationship, Maybe angst, Not quite straight, Trina is very bitter, Very Jewish, literally cocoa powder, marvin is mentioned but doesn't appear, musings, very middle class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 13:34:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15931478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aviaries/pseuds/Aviaries
Summary: It was an édute. Short. Difficult. A trial to improve her skill at that ever changing waltz called marriage. Dramatic footwork to try to close the gap between her and her distant husband, however as she took her step forward, he moved away. Those photographs that hung on the wall were forced caricatures of the modern marriage. What a model nuclear family. What a horrible laugh.~Marvin doesn't speak to her the day after. Trina doesn't wonder why. So she tries to fill the silence. Too bad that silence is replaced by the deafening musings of ten long years of marriage.





	Étude

It was an édute. Short. Difficult. A trial to improve her skill at that ever changing waltz called marriage. Dramatic footwork to try to close the gap between her and her distant husband, however as she took her step forward, he moved away. Those photographs that hung on the wall were forced caricatures of the modern marriage. What a model nuclear family. What a horrible laugh.

The day after Whizzer Brown was found in her house (in her and Marvin’s house) kissing her husband, Trina had waited patiently for Marvin to scold her about the whole affair. She had embarrassed him. She had tried to impose on her power in the Cohen household. But nothing happened. Marvin barely  _ spoke _ to her as she prepared his eggs and set them on the table with the toast and the butter. No meat, of course. Marvin had always complained about that rule, but Trina stayed firm on it.

_ If you want meat so badly, forgo the butter _ , Trina had said, indicating to the kosher rule about mixing as  _ fleishig _ and  _ milchig  _ meals. Marvin insisted that, since they were Reform, it shouldn’t matter. Especially since Marvin was “ _ heavily  _ reform.” To the point of seeming to pick and choose what part of faith to follow based on either logic, convenience, or just plain preference. Trina was Reform as well, but found that following more of the commandments and scripture made her feel easier. More controlled, if she had to pick a descriptor, though she hesitated to say such a thing for fear of insulting the very scripture she adored. Most anything that made Trina feel like she had a guideline to follow, a way to stay on a steady course, was welcome. Perhaps the biggest exception to that rule was the patriarchal society that she lived in. True, Judaism was made up of a patriarchal history, from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Joshua and even later with monarchy with Saul, David, and Solomon.

Trina pounded her dough, intent on making challah despite the fact that Shabbat wasn’t for another day. The tension in her fingers was causing her significant trouble. This is what she did. She stress cooked. Which, she supposed, was good for Marvin because he wouldn’t leave her alone until he had something to eat. He had to have his breakfast. He would fight her to make it. He would yell at her have it ready for him when he got out of the shower, even if she was tired. Even when they were younger, new parents, when Jason had a bad night.

The mother couldn’t blame her son for his nightmares and fears. Trina and Marvin were  _ not  _ the best equipped to be parents. They weren’t the best equipped to be  _ married _ . Jason woke up during the night once. He woke up to find his mother sitting by the television, running white noise as the connection had been frayed, crying. Her nose was running, her face red and puffy. He crawled up next to her with her short little five-year-old legs and hugged her, trying to help her. He didn’t know what he could do to help his mother. Trina hugged him, an act which she regretted. It wasn’t because the act of hugging was wrong. It was because the act of leaning on her child for that support was questionable at its best and inappropriate at its worst.

_ Daddy went on a business trip _ , Trina had said.  _ And it was a last minute thing. He’ll be back in a few days, alright? _

If Trina had only known. Her husband was digging his own societal grave.  _ Go on _ , she had said in her private thought.  _ You go ahead and drag Jason and me down with you _ . He returned home late at night, his headlights shining down the street right into the Applebaum’s windows. The neighbors who used to ask Trina questions about her faith were now no longer even talking with her about the gossip of the town. Trina wasn’t quite interested in it anyways, but the fact that they would tell her she was “great” bothered her now. She smiled and accepted the compliment. She wanted to believe that this was genuine. But it was all candor. It was all a show. Because what their neighbor, Mrs. Greenberg, a woman with two sons about Jason’s age, had said was that Trina was more of a clown than a wife. More of a fool for trusting that her husband wasn’t going to leave her.

Well, Mrs. Greenberg was right.

Their son was now nine, an intellectual for his age but also a recluse. He didn’t speak to the other boys his age. The ones who refused to be psychoanalyzed. Jason resisted as well. Marvin was just now beginning to see a shrink--no, sorry, a psychiatrist. And he was intent on having Trina see him as well.

_ Smack _ .

Trina’s fist connected with a concealed bubble of air in the dough. Overworked, probably. Trina stopped and put it back in the bowl, covered it with a cloth, and waited for it to rise. Her face was covered in flour, probably to hide the redness of her anger and disappointment. Good. A ghost. She would be a ghost.

_ What difference would it be to Marvin? _ She asked herself, a hollow, unamused laugh audibly escaping her as she sat at the kitchen table. Her usual spot. Beside Jason. Across from Marvin and his ever-present newspaper and everlasting temper.  _ I  _ am _ a ghost. Marvin could walk right through me and not bat an eye. _

Her bitterness could have ruined honey. And Trina thought about the High Holy Days that were coming up in a few weeks and thought about how awful it was going to be when she had to atone. Well, should  _ she  _ be the one atoning? Marvin was at fault, wasn’t he? He was the one who left her to fend for herself against the harsh and solemn days that seemed to suffocate her. She had all the freedom of the day to do  _ nothing  _ (or everything if she chose.) But that wasn’t exactly true. Because Marvin expected breakfast and dinner. And Marvin wanted the house clean. And all that freedom was a ruse because Marvin didn’t want Trina to work anymore. He could provide for both of them and their young son. He was  _ the man _ . And Trina’s desk job as a secretary was useless to him. She didn’t have a  _ real _ job. Her boss, the insufferable, arrogant fool, was the one doing the  _ real work.  _ Trina would have had the mind to tell him to check her hand-done spreadsheets if she weren’t so nervous about everything. If she were mentally stable enough to have a fight with Marvin. But she wasn’t. She was on the verge. And especially now, seven years post-job, she was still trying to prove herself.

Back to the question on her mind as she picked at her nails, the light colored polish (a questionable decision by Trina re: faith) that she kept to keep from biting her nails was already chipped.

Was it Trina’s fault? Would she walk to Temple and fear for the stares of judgment from her peers? From the women she hosted Oneg Shabbat with. The ones who were always asking her for her honey-pie recipe and asking which market was the best for Orange Blossom honey from Rosh Hashanah. For some reason, Trina couldn’t bring herself to completely blame Marvin.

_ I’m the one who’s unlovable _ , she heard in her head. Which, she believed in some form of a cognitive level, was ridiculous. 

Trina thought back to their wedding night. Marvin, laying in bed, looking at Trina with a look of confusion and worry. A look of anxiety that Trina was expecting to be on her own face. It wasn’t as if it was a foreign concept. They got married for Jason. Quite literally. But Marvin had brushed his hand against her skin and recoiled so violently that Trina had worried about his health. Hypochondriacs forever.

Then, Marvin said in an exhausted voice, “Darling, I’m tired.” 

Not even her name. He didn’t call her Trina until the day after their wedding. And even then, it was once to introduce her to some friends on their honeymoon. Trina had played a game of solitaire that night. She sat at the small table in their hotel room while the small television played background noise and illuminated the small room in their small world. Sound and light. A game of solitaire by television glow. And Marvin was fast asleep, his fingers curled as if tortured.

Trina wished she would mind.

A timer went off and Trina went to check the bread, her mind quickly torn from her reminiscing. She peered into the bowl and found the dough was alright, despite Trina’s constant pounding on it. Her use of it as one of Jason’s stress toys of some kind. 

She started to braid it, continuing to make a mistake every two intersections and then starting over. When it was finally done, she brushed the egg wash on it and stuck it into the oven. Timer set again, she walked to the den out of instinct bringing it with her.

Her mouth curved into a small smile. It wasn’t for any nice reason. It was an ironic, unamused smile as she saw something tucked into the back of the sofa cushions. Trina braved the room and pulled it from it’s crevice. 

**W.B.**

Embroidered. Trina thought about her own embroidered handkerchief, almost the same font, and wondered if Marvin had given it to Whizzer. Or maybe they were just alike that way. A fun cursive font was all it took to appease them. She tossed the handkerchief on the coffee table, sure Marvin would see it, and almost positive it would be gone within the next days and back into pretty boy’s hands.

Trina didn’t dare sit on the sofa, despite her habit of just resting her eyes while she waited for the timer.

She sat in the recliner. It was an old recliner given to them by Marvin’s grandad. Trina didn’t mind it so much. She sat there when Jason and Marvin listened to the ball game on the radio.

“Pick a better team, Marvin,” Trina said aloud, thinking of the 1977 season and Marvin’s instance that the Mets would make a miraculous comeback. 

The temptation of the radio to drown out the already overflowing cornucopia of intrusive thoughts was tempting, but Trina decided against it. She didn’t want to drown them out. She needed to process this. She needed to be ready when Marvin got home to face everything. Everything. Anything. 

Trina considered just last year when she would calm her nerves with wine. Not enough to be bold. Not enough to even be inebriated or slightly intoxicated. Just… enough. Just enough to get her through breakfast. That’s right. An itty bitty glass of wine before Marvin even got up. Cheap stuff, too. She didn’t care for that fancy kind because (1) the only good wine Trina liked was for Jewish community events, and (2) Marvin insisted it cheaper if she was going to go through so much. Marvin knew. He questioned the empty bottled in the trash. But he didn’t stop her. He was done by that point. He and Trina were already falling apart, their sanity unraveling at the ends. 

_ “Time to wake up,” Trina shouted at him one morning when he was particularly moody and particularly prickly. “Time to wake up, Marvin! The day won’t face itself.” _

_ While Marvin was feeling particularly moody, Trina had felt particularly vindictive. Her glass of wine that morning was peculiarly strong, and she wondered if was the year, the brand, or both. _

She was supposed to pick Jason up from school soon, she remembered, looking at the timer and then at the clock on the wall. She had time. Just take out the challah, then pick up Jason, and send him to his room with a chess board and his pawns and kings, and then just sleep.

Sleeping was her portal to the future. If Trina was upset, sometimes she would just go cry and sleep and have an alarm set for two hours before Marvin got home so she could make dinner.

_ You cry like it’s a scene from a bad play _ , Marvin told her aggressively.  _ It’s on cue. Just to make me feel bad. _

“Shut up, Marvin.”

Trina was surprised those words left her mouth. She would never say them to him. Never. She was too shy for that nonsense. Too demure and uncertain and insecure and afraid. Afraid was a much better word because Marvin had a temper and she didn’t want to deal with his childish fits.

As she thought more and more, she realized, finally, just how fed up she was. Just how much this marriage was indeed a dance towards a precipice.

Her father had insisted she marry Marvin in the first place when it was discovered she was pregnant with Jason. Marvin acquiesced.

The time trickled by as Trina continued to seeth. Her hands gripped the fabric of the recliner in a death grip as every business trip Marvin took killed another part of her soul. Her heart was being ripped in two because of what Marvin had done. Hadn’t done.

Hadn’t kissed her. Hadn’t touched her. Hadn’t awkwardly touched her breast like he had a few nights  _ after  _ the wedding in an attempt to force himself to have some kind of sexual contact. Trina had to hold him by the shoulders and calm him down as he got angry with the situation. The mood wasn’t right. Trina sighed and kissed him that night. It had been weeks, maybe months, since Marvin had given her any sort of intimate affection. Because… he was affected.

All those diseases and everything were a way to tell her that they couldn’t have sex. And Trina had faltered when he had told her that she might want to get tested. They both knew she wouldn’t do anything of the sort. Not now. Not ever. What kind of man asks his wife to go alone to a clinic and check for  _ that _ sort of disease? She wasn’t the promiscuous one. She wasn’t the one leaving for other states to just hook up. What happened to monogamy?

(Trina would later find out that Marvin’s business trip to Florida was really an extended stay with Whizzer and a night downtown to a gay bar, an idea of Whizzer’s and a facilitator of a drunk Marvin pounding on the door because he was too drunk to realize he was holding his key upside down.)

The timer. That cursed timer went off and after a minute’s hesitation, Trina rushed to the kitchen to take out the challah, slightly burned and crisped, but in all fairness, Trina was a bit preoccupied with her thoughts.

Once it was prepped and put under a wrap, she got together her things and went to walk the seven blocks to Jason’s school. Jason was fine. Introverted, as usual. Mad at his mother despite her lack of conversation. Or maybe he wasn’t  _ mad _ . Just… disappointed. Trina felt like he had all the makings in one eye-roll to be  _ her  _ mother (or father.).  Well, if Trina was going to be Marvin’s mother, taking care of him in that senseless way he needed but didn’t need her, then what else could happen?

Trina thought back to the night with the white noise television, the pile of teary tissues, and Jason hugging her. That was it. That was probably it. Jason’s protectiveness of her, the candies and notes in her coat pockets, were all because Trina was too weak to do anything for herself. Anything that required real skill or effort besides the  _ simple _ tasks of the kitchen and the household. Marvin was the governance. Jason was a protector. Trina was… Trina.

Jason had indeed gone up to play chess and sulk in his room. Maybe he had caught on? Even for Marvin and Trina, breakfast had been uncharacteristically quiet. A non-event. And Jason sat silently watching Trina look at Marvin with hopeful, maybe expectant, eyes while Marvin just read the paper and frowned whenever some government official did something incredibly  _ dumb _ .

It wasn’t going to be a long nap. Trina retired to her own bedroom and crawled into her side of the bed, not even bothering to take off her yellow cardigan. Just a nap. But all the emotional pressure, the lack of catharsis was hurting her. 

_ (It was thought, when Freud was a power of the psychological world, that catharsis worked like the pressure in a pot. It worked like you had to break down to relieve all your tension. Trina would discover as she viciously baked and cooked and broiled and boiled that it wasn’t true. Catharsis was later devalued as a coping technique in 2002.) _

Trina slipped into her side of the bed, under the sheets that she had meticulously put in place that morning. Her mind was tired. Her vernacular was tired of being drawn back on to try to think of words for Marvin. This was her étude. 

Her technical skills in the kitchen, in the household, and in the garden were enough to get her this far, but this wasn’t the romantic fantasy she had tried to delude herself into believing. Though, really, did she ever believe in that spark with Marvin?

This wasn’t elegant. She could not finesse the footwork. She could not match Marvin’s steps, his grand design. Her reaction wasn’t quick enough as he took a sweeping turn, changing the form of the dance and the preparedness of her life.

It wasn’t a waltz she was dancing with Marvin anymore. It was something more. He tries to hold her steady, hold that final pose just long enough to count as their finale, the judges anticipating some sort of fall, and then it happens. And Marvin’s off to the next dance with Whizzer. And Trina’s left on the ground with no more rounds left.

She slept through her alarm. Marvin found her curled up with a pillow, her makeup still on, her hair mussed up from her fitful sleep. And for whatever reason, for once, Marvin didn’t yell at her. He ordered take out. Jason and Marvin ate Chinese while listening to the game. Trina didn’t join them. Trina didn’t even wake up.

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!! I threw a bunch of references in here so if you have one you find particularly amusing, let me know! I love hearing from you! I hope this story and this series is interesting to you and that you enjoy!
> 
> Another note, this work might be incredibly Jewish so I don't know if anyone wants me to explain references but I can definitely do so if you ask! I just don't want to have to add a whole description at the end if people don't request it.
> 
> Best,  
> Tamsin


End file.
